Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “What I want does exist if I dare to find it...”

— Jeanette Winterson

52. “Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.”

— Jeanette Winterson

53. “I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.”

— Jeanette Winterson

54. “This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.”

— Jeanette Winterson

55. “What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?”

— Jeanette Winterson

56. “The only selfish life is a timid one.”

— Jeanette Winterson

57. “In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.”

— Jeanette Winterson

58. “I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.”

— Jeanette Winterson

59. “Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”

— Jeanette Winterson

60. “Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

61. “I have no idea what happens next.”

— Jeanette Winterson

62. “I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.”

— Jeanette Winterson

63. “The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.”

— Jeanette Winterson

64. “When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.”

— Jeanette Winterson

65. “We don’t go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.”

— Jeanette Winterson

66. “I keep telling this story – different people, different places, different times – but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.”

— Jeanette Winterson

67. “In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.”

— Jeanette Winterson

68. “I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.”

— Jeanette Winterson

69. “I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”

— Jeanette Winterson

70. “In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.? Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest. Feel for yourself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

71. “You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?”

— Jeanette Winterson

72. “I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

73. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

74. “A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn’t it?”

— Jeanette Winterson

75. “Naked is the best disguise.”

— Jeanette Winterson

76. “To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself – my fossil-love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

77. “That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

— Jeanette Winterson

78. “I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.”

— Jeanette Winterson

79. “You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, ‘Tristan.’ I answered you: ‘Isolde.’ Isolde. The world became a word.”

— Jeanette Winterson

80. “The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.”

— Jeanette Winterson

81. “Time is a boomerang, not an arrow.”

— Jeanette Winterson

82. “It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.”

— Jeanette Winterson

83. “I don’t believe in happy endings.”

— Jeanette Winterson

84. “Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.”

— Jeanette Winterson

85. “What you eat is the most political thing you do every day.”

— Jeanette Winterson

86. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

— Jeanette Winterson

87. “I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.”

— Jeanette Winterson

88. “Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.”

— Jeanette Winterson

89. “Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn’t our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets.”

— Jeanette Winterson

90. “However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.”

— Jeanette Winterson

91. “The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water – either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in your rock – your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright.”

— Jeanette Winterson

92. “I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can’t give up love. Maybe it’s the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

93. “When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.”

— Jeanette Winterson

94. “I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

95. “The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”

— Jeanette Winterson

96. “Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It’s all legend, it is all rumor.”

— Jeanette Winterson

97. “I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

98. “I can change the story. I am the story.”

— Jeanette Winterson

99. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? He said.”

— Jeanette Winterson

100. “She was a monster, but she was my monster.”

— Jeanette Winterson